Tag Archives: The Second Law of Thermodynamics

This is surely a feeling only a cynical or jaded person could have. The word was discovered by my friend Luciana Pimentel in a dictionary of “work jargon”. Well, I guess people do get jaded by their workplaces and know from experience that the next training seminar or PowerPoint presentation might not be the most scintillating part of their day.

Luciana, not her dictionary, provided two definitions of anticippointment:

The inevitability of the bloom coming off the rose [I like this poetic definition—cynical, but true, I have to admit]

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as The Impossibility of a Perpetuum Mobile of the Second Degree. (Luciana admitted that this definition is for the geeks among us.)

With this second definition, Luciana is referring to the attempts by countless inventors to create a perpetual motion machine. Physicists agree it can’t be done, because this would violate the laws of thermodynamics. If you really want to explore this further, wikipedia can help.

I liked “anticippointment because it’s such a clever combination of “anticipation” and “disappointment”. It rolls off the tongue easily, too.

However, upon thinking about it more carefully, I’ve decided that the word is an oxymoron. By definition, disappointment implies some kind of surprise; something turned out differently than was expected. But if you are already anticipating a negative outcome, how can you be surprised—and thus disappointed?

Editing Tip of the Week

Quote of the Week

Prolific novelist, poet, and literary critic Robert Penn Warren on why one doesn’t need to travel in order to “find” oneself:

. . . the self is never to be found, but must be created, not the happy accident of passivity, but the product of a thousand actions, large and small, conscious or unconscious, performed not “away from it all,” but in the face of “it all,” for better or for worse, in work and leisure rather than in free time.

Warren won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1946 novel All the King’s Men, and also won Pultizers twice for his poetry.